Supporters of gun ownership in the United States frequently present the argument that it is not the gun that kills people, it is the person holding it. This presupposes that the US federal or state authorities have efficient systems that can keep guns out of the wrong hands. It is quite clear that such systems do not exist. There may be a few places in America where it is very hard to buy a gun but there is virtually nowhere where it is impossible. This is a country awash with guns and not simply the handguns that nervous motorists can carry in their glove compartments. Americans can legitimately own military grade weapons of awesome firepower. It is possible to see how a handgun could be kept for self-defense and it is obvious how useful a good rifle can be for a huntsman, but who in their right mind would need, let alone want to own, a weapon capable of blowing any animal form, including humans, into bloody little pieces, slicing through a tree or blasting a respectable hole in a wall? There are at a conservative estimate 300 million guns in America. The National Rifle Association responds to each new massacre carried out by a gun-totting American by arguing that if more people had guns they could stop crazed shooters. Thus after successive massacres of kids in schools, they said that if the teachers had been armed they could have gunned down the attackers. This is to suppose that teachers would be prepared to train themselves to own, maintain and shoot a firearm accurately. Members of the NRA seem to imagine that everyone should be as addicted as they are to spending hours on shooting ranges or popping away at tin cans on top of fence posts. In terms of the now regular US mass killings, this week's Orlando nightclub shooting is the largest single loss of life inflicted by a crazed gunman, and regardless of the cause in which Omar Mateen claimed to be acting, this was patently the act of a madman. The NRA argument that more guns will guard against such mass murders is rather exposed by the fact that there was in fact an armed but off-duty cop in the club who was unable to do anything about Mateen, even though as a policeman, he had received rigorous firearms training. Forty-nine people died and as many again were wounded, some of them catastrophically, because the NRA has stood up steadfastly for the right of people like Mateen to own devastatingly powerful assault weapons. The NRA has always clung to the Second Amendment which gives US citizens the right to bear arms. It has always chosen to ignore the fact that the amendment was made in support of civilian militias in an age before America had a permanent standing army. The gun lobby has for years browbeaten legislators into limiting their restrictions on gun ownership. Congressmen have been mad to listen to them, mad to believe that protecting jobs in the US small arms industry was worth mass murder after mass murder. But most of all, the NRA, in its core defense of near universal gun ownership in the face of all the horrific and bloody consequences of this view, is clearly itself insane.
